By Ike Señeres
IT is already happening, and the trend will continue. The prices of smart phones are going down, as the quality of their features is going up. It is a foregone conclusion now that everything that personal computers could do could also be done by smart phones. Looking at it another way, it could be said in a manner of speaking that smart phones have actually become personal computers that you could hold in your hand and carry around. The common denominator in this trend of convergence is internet access. In other words, it is the capability to access the Internet that makes the mobile phones smart. The other common denominator is the capability of these two devices to be transactional, by way of browsers that are able to access any website.
Good websites have to be informative and interactive. Beyond these two basic features however, websites have to be transactional, if it has to be useful in the first place. The need to be transactional has become more important now that smart phones are already able to access the internet, for as long as there is a signal of course. It would really be a waste of resources if there would be a lot of smart phones in the hands of many people, and yet there would be very few websites that are transactional. This reminds me of the long running “competition” between infrastructure and content, wherein the latter has obviously emerged as the winner. We already have millions of smart phones in the hands of many people. All we need now is good content to maximize their use.
Technically speaking, mobile apps are running on software that is native to the smart phones, meaning that apps do not need browsers to access content. Since apps are running on software that is native to smart phones, they are actually just “fetching” information from remote servers, instead of “browsing” information from a website. By the nature of its technology, apps are designed to be transactional and that is why apps would tend to be more useful than browsers in a manner of speaking. As more smart phones become more available to more people however, the demarcations between apps and browsers would not matter anymore, because both of them would be available on handheld devices, and it is up to the user to choose which one to use.
I remember that about fifteen years ago, there was a farmer information system in the United States that was operating on a radio frequency. It was providing market information to American farmers in the old American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) format, very similar in appearance to the old Compuserve information service. Crude as it was, it game timely and useful information to American farmers, practically functioning like an electronic Farmer’s Almanac. Those days are gone now, and I could now imagine that American farmers are now getting their market information using either apps or browsers. My wish now is that the same thing could happen in the Philippines; that all sectors of society would be able not only to get information online, but also to transact online.
Actually, the interactive part of a software system is the key towards making it transactional, sort of becoming a missing link. Going back to the example about farmers, my wish is that they could now have access to market information using either apps or browsers, so that they could be guided in their buying and selling decisions. Long before information and communications technology (ICT) came along, not having access to market information has been a problem for farmers, because they are always victimized by traders and middlemen because they do not know what the real market prices are. Because of that lack of information, they have no choice but to sell at very low farm gate prices.
In theory, ICT is supposed to have a liberating effect, and it is about time that this theory would become a reality, now that the infrastructure to make this happen is already here. However, it is one thing for the farmers to know what the market prices are, it is another thing for them to be able to buy or sell at the prices that are favorable to them, at the time that they decide to do so. This is not a trivial matter for them, because their ability to buy or sell at the right price at the right time could be a matter of survival for them. I realize that I am now talking about electronic commerce, but that is precisely my point, to make this technology available to all sectors in a way that is not only liberating, but also democratizing.
By the way, just to set the record straight, our farmers would not even need smart phones in order to transact via mobile phones. Even the oldest mobile phone unit could be used to transact business, using the ASCII format, and using the old reliable Short Messaging Service (SMS). Those who remember the old mainframe days would even say that the SMS syntax is very similar in appearance to old computer languages such as the Common Business Oriented Language (Cobol). If at all we would like this level of messaging to somehow go high tech, we could even use the Unstructured Supplementary Service Data (USSD) technology, the forgotten cousin of SMS.